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Central Exchange
Central Exchange is an expansive trading company well known for its slave trading and former position as the dominant force across a large portion of North America. History Origin in Kansas Prior to Square One US Army installation Fort Riley had been an important training center for military transition teams overseen by the resident First Infantry Division. US Army COL Nathan Abbot had been transferred along with a sizeable regiment of troops to the Fort Riley installation only four months prior to Square One. Though Riley suffered its own share of losses in the Die-Off, oral accounts describe Abbot as cool, though gracious to be alive, in the aftermath. When the former base commander committed suicide only one day in, Abbot confidently ascended the position. Though quelling unrest in the base itself was the first order of business, Abbot eagerly formed two teams to address the world outside, citing their responsibility as soldiers to serve the public as effectively as possible. The first was a team of operator-maintainers tasked with contacting other bases via HAM equipment that had been EMP-proofed. The other was a large company sent east to help secure Fort Leavenworth as a stronghold for National Guard and Army forces addressing the Kansas City-Topeka region. Both teams would succeed, but the operators sooner. Contacting a national guard camp near Tulsa, Army BG David Wilson would be the first to respond, and maybe the most important of Abbot's allies moving forward. As more bases were reached, more information came to Riley. The Cabinet, Congress, Governors; most were dead or missing, and practically all lines of communication had gone dark in the Blackout. Through the distress the news brought, the commanders assured their staff that their own roles had not changed: restoring order was their job, and they were needed now more than ever. Conversations between commanders would become private after this point; but as Abbot declared the Leavenworth mission a success and pivoted his attention south to Wichita, few people noticed. Bringing order began to take on new meanings as missions grew more complex. Clearing debris and breaking up fights had given way to asset collection, land acquisition, and direct engagement with the provisional governments of the time. Abbot proposed and executed a barrage of plans dedicated to reconstruction and efficiency that nobody could believe he'd had time to draft, each more elaborate and effective than the last. As each new need developed, Abbot would seemingly uncover the resources to meet it out of the blue, every time. Barely six months after Square One, authority was returning to Topeka, Wichita, and parts of Kansas City. That authority was Fort Riley. Foundation Though the cities hadn't been engulfed in riot for some time, banditry, migration, and infrastructural damage were obstacles East Kansas could not seem to surmount on the trail to full revitalization. Determining the northern protectorates to be stable enough, Abbot arranged for a face-to-face meeting with Wilson halfway between Riley and Tulsa in Wichita. No documents exist detailing this meeting, but Abbot is remembered as returning confident and intent on a new direction. At a gathering broadcasted throughout East Kansas, Abbot announced his plan to partner with their Oklahoma neighbors in order to pool assets, resources, and infrastructure as the civil service providers to the towns in their respective spheres of influence. Next, he elected to clear the confusion as to where Riley ended and the cities began: referencing the exchange of goods between the cities and his own facilities, as well as export to other parts of the country, he formalized the now-united Kansas and Oklahoma military elements as a private entity that would be called the Central States Exchange (CSE). Finally, he proposed a single solution to soothe the violence of raiders, the food shortages, and the disrepair of facilities: criminals —including those raiders— who would otherwise be killed would be put to work as unpaid laborers. Though he proclaimed these motions with resolution, Abbot invited representatives of each town under his care for decorum's sake, and approval was voiced unanimously. In Oklahoma, Wilson hosted a similar exchange. The declaration of the CSE as private turned some heads, but most took it to be mere semantics at this point and the broadcasts passed with little controversy. With the announcement, Abbot and Wilson had freed themselves from municipal accountability, opening a door and setting the groundwork for what would become North America's most extensive faction in the new world. Growth Expansion About two years after Square One the CSE began setting its sights beyond its home on the southeast edge of the Great Plains. CSE reached out to its HAM network of selected contacts and beyond, enrolling dozens of fortresses and commanders with city connections over a matter of weeks. In another two years CSE had posts ranging from the base of the Rocky Mountains to the East side of the Mississippi River Valley, and rebranded as simply "the Central Exchange" (CE). A slew of meetings were called during and following this first registration period, and plans would be drafted to improve and consolidate resource outputs across the whole of current and, they expected, future CE holdings. Over the course of the next decade CE would work to clear and repair major routes between their key sites with dedicated highway and railroad engineers supported by an increasingly massive unpaid prisoner workforce. Early in this process, CE's leadership predicted that 20 years following Square One, they would be able to travel the length of Route 50 without passing through a major town they lacked presence in. Obstacles began presenting themselves, however— not all contacted personnel elected to join. Notable installations like The Pentagon, Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Quantico, and Pendleton turned down every offer. Similarly, some regions remained obstinate in denying trade with the conglomerate, ultimately leaving CE without dominant footholds in the Mid Atlantic, South Florida, Southern California, Appalachia, and swaths of Texas. While not enough personnel could be mustered to establish primacy in these areas, some selected sites and parties who opted not to incorporate could be accounted for: scout platoons were developed and assigned to monitor and in some cases harass or outright sabotage these groups. Early Labor Trade and Market Development During the years of expansion, life in towns with CE presence would see a series of changes originating in the new Prisoner Labor policy. As farms went from dozens of soldiers on duty to a single assigned to keep watch over the detained, personnel for patrols increased immensely, drastically reducing losses from raiding parties and enlarging the surplus of food that could be traded abroad or reserved for drought or migrant influx. The policy proved effective, and many towns —even those without CE presence— began to develop small prisoner workforces of their own, often bought from the Exchange. Noticing the popularity of labor trade, now-CE president Nathan Abbot and vice president David Wilson decided to advance the scope of the practice. Citing corporal punishment common for petty criminals of the time as cruel, CE announced it would replace these punishments with a labor debt system: minor transgressors would instead work off a debt owed to CE and society in the form of a number of days' unpaid labor. Complaints arose soon after, often centered around the number of days assigned to a loved one, but most were quelled or outright ignored as the cities again followed CE policy to maintain profit and a friendly relationship with Exchange depots. Municipal bodies were not the only ones to see the value in trading with the Exchange. Though they had traded in the past with powerful private groups, CE was visited in a rising trend by individuals and small groups scrabbling together the sum of their belongings in order to meet the minimum asset requirement for barter deals. CE quickly noticed a well of untapped opportunity in a lower-cost system, identifying two primary sources of demand: The first, an increasingly wealthy caste grown tired of accepting what their cities saw fit to sell or distribute them out of government trade deals. The second, property owners beyond city limits with even narrower access to buy what the nearest township sent to the market from high-value trades. With a relatively secure and increasingly involved infrastructure, it was decided that heavily-processed mass trades should no longer be CE's limit when it came to incoming goods and interacting with their neighbors. Regulated trades were lucrative ones, however, and CE determined it would need another medium to increase efficiency and flexibility while ensuring bargain accuracy. Determining a currency ought to be developed in order to facilitate complex transactions, CE began distributing "dollar" amounts in the form of simple pressed coins, representative of a number of CE reserve resources (originally oil stored in Tulsa). Simple recruiting and maintenance offices in towns expanded into thriving emporiums as trading exploded, and straightforward, bulk deals between CE and non-members gave way to an intricate economy of small and big buyers and sellers. Many towns, long eager to streamline direct trading among their own populace, began taking on the CE dollar as their own, and although trading across the board boomed, labor trade would be the staple. Increasing Membership and Cultural Shift Naturally, territorial and economic expansion saw rising head counts. During initial stages of expansion campaigns, new members would consist almost entirely of former US military personnel serving on the bases CE reached out to for enrollment. Bases alone did not bring regional influence though, and steps to diversify were taken swiftly after a commander would sign on. Local militias, small economic unions, and even large raiding parties would be among the groups contacted as potential partners and eventual employees of CE as a means of rapidly developing more comprehensive supervision over vast tracts of land. Enlistment of groups outside of former US civil servants did more than change CE's map, though: its customs changed as well. Despite military posts serving as the headquarters for every "division" CE had partitioned their sphere of influence into, former military personnel became slowly outnumbered among CE agents dispatched to settlements and across the lands. Occasionally formal military forces and hired-on guns would come to blows over who belonged and "what it meant" to be a part of CE, eventually prompting a response from the leadership. Determining forward progress was contingent on further hires outside of the military remnants, Fort Riley urged regional heads to begin cycling spare parties in and out of bases, ease up on discipline, and phase out obsolete jargon and traditional martial practice. The changes would be mostly cosmetic: CE had, for some time, barely bothered to maintain its initial pretense as a service corps among its own personnel, and the noble goal for most had shifted from reconstruction for all to ensuring the CE's progress and their position within it. This club mentality was beneficial, but its basis had to lie in the present rather than the past. Future affiliation with CE needed to be enticing and easy, and would be: it would not be long before general recruitment offices opened in major trade posts and those who felt to complain about tradition were lost among scores of new, more eager, personnel. Old fashioned formality and discipline would ebb more with time, and although the chain of command still saw strict enforcement, productivity became the enshrined principle. CE's attachment to the image of the soldier dissolved as the economic hub of Tulsa replaced Fort Riley as headquarters. Hints of the army origins remained in simplified basic training procedures and semi-standardized uniforms, but behavioral infractions would rarely meet with reprimand – often towns had little power to make demands of CE. The new business-first CE was far more flexible in infrastructure and action, and future prospects never looked brighter as they began to close the line between the coasts. Peak Years Labor Trade Intensification Setting the pace for the new world was a hard-earned responsibility and, Tulsa feared, an easily lost one. Though CE was handily the most influential outfit 25 years after Square One, others had started making themselves known in the meantime. While CE had dealt with plenty of minor interlopers before, its first true economic rival came as the claimants of the American empire in the new United States. Resource-rich and similar in origin, the USA had secured an industrial network along the East coast and begun to absorb inland settlements by the time CE started seriously working on connecting Tulsa to the Atlantic. The Exchange rushed projects to controlled ports Charleston and Jacksonville and considered their options. Loyalists to the US were not to be converted and Washington benefited from the same labor trade the Exchange did. The US, however, had a rigid legal system, and Washington still covered far less ground. Determining their size and flexibility gave them an edge over the US when it came to their core specialty, Tulsa motioned to enhance the labor trade. Noting the success of provincial practices in the lower Midwest and Mississippi river valley, leadership aimed to imitate the systems across the breadth of their holdings and secure a permanent lead over the US. CE started by pressing most of their major trading partners to sign into law what had largely been the de facto practice already– CE posts did not need to disclose acquisition reports to the jurisdictions they operated within. For the sake of the labor trade there was a purpose to this beyond dodging material accountability: the Exchange was officially no longer obligated to share prisoner trade records, including those regarding sentence duration. Little changed for gentry, chambers of commerce, and trade-dependent local governments, but a substantial pushback came from standard farmers and townspeople supplying the workforce. Mercantile and capital elite subdued the physical unrest easily enough, but the Central Exchange had earned a new title among the objectors: slavers. Scuffles with disgruntled civilians became more common, and rare exchanges with vigilante posses only earned greater antagonism from CE agents stationed outside bases. While the unrest drew some complaints from the authorities housing trade posts, Tulsa could typically leverage goods for faith. An ideological gulf had become obvious, however, and soon CE would weather the first round of consequences among their own ranks. Some of the more dutiful and old-fashioned posts had grown critical of their leadership's increasingly lax definitions of timekeeping, criminal offenders, and acceptable members and made it known through –at first minor– acts of defiance. Numerous bases disregarded new policies and argued with Tulsa over transfers and lenient hire practices, with some going as far as to stockpile resources off the record and undercut CE's bottom line. Upon Tulsa's discovery of this embezzlement the schism between what was seen as CE's roots and future came to a boil. President Abbot personally threatened to sever the lucrative Rock Island Arsenal Army Base north of St Louis if they refused to forfeit their withheld goods. Rock Island demanded a policy rollback or threatened their own willful defection. Wounded by the flippant response, Tulsa warned they would in fact intensify their new practices and take what was theirs by force should Rock Island refuse to comply– the answer was silence. Furious with the disrespect, Tulsa intended to make good on their promises and sent word to CE's birthplace in east Kansas. Riley and Leavenworth were to send platoons to rendezvous with a company in Fort Leonard Wood and form a task force dedicated to assaulting the position on Rock Island and apprehending individuals found outside friendly jurisdiction at random. In the first But some leaders responded to the message: if the people weren't taking part in progress, weren't building the country back up on the farms or roads, were they even really doing any good for themselves? Abbot still had a point to make. Hundreds of thousands unaffiliated people had passed CE agents beyond any settlement or new nation's administration. People without attachment to the orderly world, who built nothing and would never be missed by enough to make it a problem. The routine would continue. If the puritans at Rock Island and other traitorous posts wished to see an end to the system they so vehemently protested, they would return their goods and personnel to CE control. Otherwise CE would only have more hands to get work done. The decision proved disruptive and controversial; a number of posts across the former US disliked the direction they believed CE to be heading and seceded, sometimes violently. These forces, suddenly bereft of a grand leadership, would often dissolve into local municipal garrison or incorporate into other large factions now growing in the margins. g